Some Kind of Miracle - chapter one
by Miss Scarlet Says
Summary: Lily starts her new job working for Elizabeth Keen and Donald Ressler. And it's the worst day of her life!


So I showed up to my first day on the job as Elizabeth Keen's P.A looking like a crack whore. Let me explain. Not ten hours before I'd had an interview with her new company RedKeen, a brand new and high profile private investigations bureau run by the most famous woman in America. My mother had given me the ad clipped from a newspaper and told me to apply. You don't argue with Chinese mothers. You just don't. And I'd had the interview and it was really easy and I'd just got into the nearest Starbucks when my cell rang and this voice said, "Hi Lily, it's Liz Keen. You got the job. See you tomorrow at 8am."

The next few hours were a blur mostly caused by a few quick beers, a few quick wines and before me and my roommates knew it, we were paid a visit by a bottle of tequila and a 3 am conga dance around the apartment. So when the phone rang at eight in the morning, it wasn't going to be great news.

"Is this Lily?" someone asked.

I lifted my head off the kitchen table and squinted at the clock on the wall.

"Uh yeah," I croaked, "I think."

"This is Aram Mojtabai, I work with Elizabeth Keen. We were kind of, you know, wondering, where you're at?"

I looked down at my pillow, my super fake Marc Jacobs purse that my mom had smuggled in from Hong Kong, now a mess of smeared lipstick. All I could taste was last night's stupidity.

"Something happen on the subway," I lied, "I'm almost there."

"Okaaaay," said Aram, who by the way, had a supersweet voice, "see you soon." And I knew he knew what a hangover sounded like.

On the subway I looked in my mirror. Mascara and eyeliner everywhere. A face that looked as though it had passed out on pleather. How the hell was I gonna fix this. Handcream on a tissue, some fresh lipgloss and hair brushed. I could do this. I could pretend I was neither late nor hungover on my first day at work. And maybe they wouldn't know I was wearing yesterday's interview outfit. I'd call it my lucky outfit, yeah, that would do it. And if I didn't win an Academy Award for all of this, then I deserved to get fired.

RedKeen's offices were down in trendy SoHo. Elizabeth Keen, as you all know, was a former FBI agent accused of some terrible things. Now she had started up her own company and had taken a bunch of people from the FBI with her: Donald Ressler, the lovely Aram Mojtabai and Samar Navabi. They had all been on the cover of Newsweek and were fresh off Oprah's couch. Everyone wanted to know all about Liz and about her new company. And here was I, silly Lily, about to lose one of the biggest chances of my life to hang out with the gorgeous Donald Ressler.

Aram Mojtabai met with me in reception. He looked me up and down a few times.

"Lucky outfit?" he asked.

I blushed.

He smiled and guided me towards the elevators. "We're all really excited to have you work with us," he said.

We all? I hoped Donald Ressler was included in that.

Up in the RedKeen offices, Aram parked me at the reception desk and told me that Elizabeth would be out to get me in a few minutes. She was going to need me to go with her to the ABC TV studios a little bit later with Donald Ressler. My stomach did a back flip that an Olympic gymnast would have been proud of and all I could taste was tequila. More gum. More perfume. Elizabeth came out of an office, looking like a beautiful fawn caught in headlights. She was perfection. I could see the puzzled look in her eyes. She could see through my fake ass act. This girl not only showed up forty minutes late but she's as hungover as hell. Instead she just shook my hand and said, "I love your purse Lily."

I flipped it over so that the lipstick smudge was hidden.

"Marc Jacobs?" asked Liz

"Pleather Jacobs," I offered, "my mom got it for me in Hong Kong."

Liz smiled sweetly. "Maybe she could get me one too? They cost stupid money."

And she took me to her office where there was fresh hot coffee and some Danish.

"Have some breakfast Lily," she said kindly, "and a lie down on my couch. See you in a few hours." And with that she was out the door and gone.

I woke up a few hours later at the sound of someone rustling papers. Cautiously opening one eye, a man's butt was staring me in the face. One hell of a butt too. The butt belonged to a man bent over a filing cabinet drawer. As he stood up I shut my eye again. That butt was Donald Ressler's. Omg. And here I was collapsed on my new boss's couch like some alcoholic starlet and the object of my affection was tip toeing around me. So I pretended to wake up. I stretched, in what I thought was a seductive little pose, fake yawned and looked at him sleepily.

"Hi," he said, embarrassed. "Did I wake you?"

I shook my head.

He relaxed. "Good," he flung a folder at me, "time you did some work around here then."

He sat down behind Liz's desk. He was wearing glasses and he was peering at me over them. Sternly.

I sat up demurely and looked at him. "What do you want me to do, sir?"

"You can start by calling me Don." He pointed at the folder with a pen. "I want you to read all that and familiarize yourself with it all. It's our company ethos. I want you to understand it all, if you don't, then ask me. And when you're done with that, we're leaving for ABC in an hour. This is the number of the show's co-ordinator. Call them. Sort everything out. No questions about Raymond Reddington, no questions about Tom Keen and no questions about the FBI. Got it? You'll get them to sign this affadavit and email it back. Or it's no go. Okay?"

I blinked. Hard. "Okay."

"Good."

He stood up and opened the door. "See you later."

And with that he was gone. I sat down on the chair where he had been sitting and looked at the list. What the holy crap had I gotten myself into?

While Elizabeth and Don were in the studio being interviewed, my roommate Alex texted me. _You've been papped. Check it out._ Something the size of the iceblock that had sunk the Titanic filled my stomach. It was ten o'clock, I was exhausted and my hungover but trying act had been replaced with a fetching Walking Dead look. People would come into the room where I was sitting and quickly back out again. I followed Alex's link. Oh my actual God. If my mother saw this she would shred me into the wok. There was a photo of Elizabeth being greeted by a gang of paparazzi and fans outside the TV studios, a grim-faced Ressler trying to guide her through the mess of people. And then there was me. It all came flooding back. How I tried to exit the car the same time as Elizabeth, and Don Ressler, trying to get between Liz and me, tramped on my little tiny foot. And as I had tried to remove my foot from under his size holyhellthathurts boot, my foot slipped out of my shoe and as I looked down to find it, Liz's purse swung over her shoulder and hit me full on the face. _Click_. Preserved forever on the world wide web. For the entire world to see. For all eternity. Did I stress that enough?

As I sat and stared at the horror, the horror of it all, the door opened. I didn't even bother to turn around this time. Until a man spoke. And I recognized his voice.

"Well well well," he was saying, "what have we here?"

Tom Keen.

For sure I was gonna get fired now.


End file.
